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Women in India Aren't Safe on Twitter Either

'Every morning Nilanjana Roy, the Indian novelist, goes through the same routine in her New Delhi apartment: a few minutes of yoga and meditation, before turning on some Hindustani classical music to drown out the sounds of the traffic, flipping open her laptop, and refreshing Twitter. Roy has 100,000 followers; today there are 300 replies. The first one sets the tone: "You hole who should be raped by a bamboo lathi."..

It's clear from their online behavior that these men are largely privileged Hindus, many of whom live outside India and enjoy well-paying jobs. Prominent political journalist Sagarika Ghose, who has 361,000 followers on Twitter, calls them "communal techies." She also coined the now-ubiquitous term "Internet Hindu" in a reference to their infatuation with the Hindu right wing nationalist ideology of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which won an overwhelming majority in the general elections that were held in April. The Hindu far right is famously patriarchal, and blind to the
humanity and individuality of women.

In addition to harassing women simply because they are women with opinions that differ to their own, some of these men have also imported India's fault lines of caste and communalism onto social media. They attack women who belong to marginalized communities, tarnishing the modern world with their hateful old prejudices...'